Stars Fell on Barack Obama

I will go to Korea, Ike said. He campaigned during an unpopular Asian war.
And America elected Dwight David Eisenhower as president.
I will go to Iraq, Barack Obama said, campaigning during the latest unpopular war.
Now the star system in American journalism is burning, burning bright to light up the Democrat’s presidential campaign.
If the candidate doesn’t make a major foreign policy goof, the media celestials will brightly backlight his election profile. They’re going too.
You get the impression of a royal progress by an oriental potentate. Newspaper poobahs and magazine satraps and TV sultanas will climb aboard decorated dromedaries to form the entourage. The U.S. military will assist the Secret Service in Janissary duty.
Headliners from national newspapers and magazines are going.
So are all three network news anchors – Charles Gibson of ABC, Katie Couric of CBS and Brian Williams of NBC. They’ll be doing primetime interviews with the candidate.
Clang the cymbals. Blow the trumpets. Beat the tabla. The cavalcade comes.
Obama couldn’t buy this kind of publicity.
Neither could Republican opponent John McCain. Coverage of his international trips fit into the routine category.
The old hat McCain is getting the “also running” treatment stingingly felt by Hillary Rodham Clinton in her party nomination campaign against Obama.
“He’s the new guy, though,” rationalize media executives to Jim Rutenberg in The New York Times. The reporter documents the ongoing imbalance of TV coverage in favor of Obama. http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/17/us/politics/17anchors.html?ex=1374033600&en=00fc706cfaedd8e9&ei=5124&partner=permalink&exprod=permalink
My own political reporting for The Courier-Journal years ago had to measure up – literally – to the standards of the Louisville managing editor, a stickler for fairness and ethics. He used a yardstick to make sure every candidate got exactly the same number of column inches.
The M.E. also said you have to rise above your ethics sometimes. So he would excuse a lack of balanced coverage for news reasons.
Barack Obama traveling to get his foreign policy ticket punched does not excuse blatant unfairness.
Neither does the “new guy” argument after a long “rock star” campaign by the now familiar candidate.
Nor does the Ike analogy. This isn’t history. It’s politics. And the star system.
Media celebrities recognize a fellow luminary when they see one in politics. So they give chase like Magi going to Bethlehem.
Stardom is an addiction constantly to be fed. Journalism egos are not too big but too little, too insecure, too threatened not to conform with the pack. They can’t stand the idea of being left behind when the court travels abroad.
And network newscasts look enviously at ratings by cable outlets for political coverage. So on caravan they will go.
They’ll need a little music.
Here’s my parody on a Mitchell Parish, Frank Perkins lyric familiar to Alabama:

We lived our little drama, we kissed in a field of white.
And stars fell upon Obama last night.
I can’t forget the glamour, your eyes held a tender light.
And stars fell upon Obama last night.

I never planned in my imagination, a situation so heavenly
A fairy land that no one else could enter
And in the center, just you and me, dear
My heart beat like a hammer, my arms wound around you tight
And stars fell upon Obama last night.

This just in: Government discovers rumor!

Can’t fool Washington. It’s just slow on the uptake.
Word-of-mouth is humankind’s oldest form of communication.
Dame Rumor flies, wrote ancient poets such as Virgil. Truth is a pedestrian.
The feds were bound to get around to investigating that hare and tortoise race.
The Securities and Exchange Commission wants Wall Street to stop spreading false information.
Lots of luck with that.
Those turkey buzzards of day trading, the short sellers, make a living from bad information and misinformation and disinformation. They borrow stock at a high price to sell low and pocket the difference.
The shorters naturally benefit if gossip hurts a company on the Exchange while they hold its paper.
Speculation flitted right behind rumor out of Pandora’s box.
Journalism could tell federal regulators all information is baseless until verified.
But fact-checking is a tedious process that suffers when a reporter is close to deadline and when the financial world is in near panic mode as it is lately.
So we shouldn’t be cynical either about editors’ stern warning to authenticate or the SEC’s crackdown on illegal trading practices.
Realism simply tells us rumor mongering is a never ending story, with us always.
The wagging tongue as way-of-life is how vast numbers of non-readers of newspapers and non-watchers of TV are getting their news these days. Much of the news actually is commentary if not downright gossip.
Abandon all hope for straight poop as you enter the blogosphere. Yes, this blog is an outpost in the vastness of cyberspace too.
That’s why you see my name, my picture, my bona fide credentials listed – the stuff of credibility, the eternal enemy of rumor.
Trusted sources: That’s what professional journalism is all about, regardless of media platform.
The government might defeat rumor in the marketplace. Not likely. But it might. The weapon would be instantly available truth, denial, explanation to counter every whisper.
But that would require government, corporations and the financial world to be quick with credibility too.
Every reporter knows those institutions trade in deception and withheld information and controlled flow of news.
So short sellers and average citizens take rumors for granted.
Credible journalism can’t. That’s why there’ll always be a market for honest reporting.
Uphill battle that it is with Dame Rumor whispering in your ear.

Bed sheets, bazookas: New Yorker, the hen

Eustace Tilley blew this one.
If you know that name, you probably “got” the Barack-o-drama cover of The New Yorker.
Satire is a double meaning the reader is in on. Or else it’s a scam.
If the shock of the image allows a viewer to take it seriously, the artistic or literary trick becomes a mere antic, a ruse, a hustle.
The questioned cover shows Mr. and Mrs. Obama as flag burning terrorists in the Oval Office. “Politics of fear,” is the satiric target by cartoonist Barry Blitt.
Trouble is, polls show some Americans believe – wrongly, but believe anyway – the lies connecting Islam, Osama bin Laden and the possible First Couple.
Those of us who don’t believe are nervous that we live in a society where some do harbor or even foster those untruths. So we’re not too keen for the cover either.
We prefer an information campaign.
The New Yorker tried the humor of disinformation and laid an egg.
Hey, Eustace is a buddy of mine, fictional though he is. I delight in seeing the signature dandy on the front of the magazine. He’s the logo. He’s the sophistication. He’s a pretty good clothes horse, often depicted by TNY satirically with props.
Editor David Remnick can sly up the magazine’s symbol, can satirize public figures, can make fun of our social foibles.
Surely he can do a take-off on the Democrat with a funny name and a funny past and a serious chance of becoming president.
Well, yes. If he can answer one question: Does the cover communicate?
Not to Eustace’s standard is the answer.
Remnick knows how hard irony is to wield as a means of conversation. And he must know he goofed. Because he’s trying to explain the joke. That’s proof positive the joke fell as flat as a magazine cover.
It’s as lame as New York Times editor Bill Keller trying to explain the paper meant to say Republican presidential candidate John McCain showed poor judgment about ethics, not that he had an affair necessarily.
Manhattan is an island. Those editors need to swim to shore more often.
For The Times to link sex and a politician was to run a public DNA test on his bed sheets.
For The New Yorker to attack ignorance with sophistication was to bring a pen knife to a bazooka fight.

Sen. Gramm’s Ph.D. economy goof while 'helping out' Sen. McCain proves public, press, politicians need a common language

Let’s drop the word “economics” in favor of “quality of life.”
Public, politicians and media might get it right then.
Sen. John McCain’s Republican quest to be president is but the latest to foul up. He did it through a stand-in, former Sen. Phil Gramm.
We’re but a “nation of whiners,” said that Ph.D. in economics. Gramm claimed we’re only in a “mental recession.”
Insert funny comment here: Maybe it’s the professor who has the receding mind…he taught at Texas A&M, so maybe this is an aggie joke gone bad…or as Barack Obama, leader of the Democratic presidential camp commented, “America already has one Dr. Phil.”
We don’t need a shrink to know we can’t buy or sell houses, afford fuel and food, meet the hidden tax of rising college tuition, find a job in some cases or get a raise in others.
John McCain still thinks trickle down works, corporations will save us out of the goodness of their hearts and oil policy means greasing the palms of petro execs yet again.
He’s a goose egg on money matters. So he uses Gramm to tell him what to think. But no one told Gramm how to speak.
To be fair we lack a common language about finances. An egghead looks at the numbers, the institutions, the science of capitalism and sees the engine running right along.
The people see only the result and feel the engine running them down.
Reporters don’t translate between the two opposites, which is why God invented journalism – so media would communicate.
When the Gramm-McCain gaffe broke, that’s all the story was. Media treated it as yet another misstep in the political pasture full of language cow patties.
In journalism we call this a daily process story, because it lacks context.
An enterprising reporter covering Gramm-McCain could have, might have, should have included news of the whole day: \

• The federal government is stepping up to support the two mortgage holders that account for half the nation’s mortgages, which add up to $12 trillion.
• Banks are in the tank.
• Gas isn’t, because of costs, which won’t quit with President Bush drawing a military bead on Iran.
• Food expense is tied to fuel.
• Goalposts for retirement keep moving because of all of above.

We’re not whining, Dr. Gramm. We’re living life and enjoying it less. We’re also reading the papers.
We’re just not reading the right story. It would put two and two together, linking screwy political views, the public’s disconnect from brainy economists and daily living.
No more petty political items. No more campaign gotchas. No more disconnects.
Media need to change the language: It’s not the economy, stupid. It’s the quality of life.
Then we would no longer be a nation joined asunder by so many misunderstandings about the meaning of money.
That’s one thing we all have in common, money, but commonly not enough.

Live wires promote the living truth

I know, let’s open all the microphones all the time.
The Rev. Jesse Jackson is merely the latest public figure to speak ugly into a hot mic he apparently thought was dead.
He apologized to Barack Obama for calling the Democratic presidential hopeful out of his name. (That’s a wonderful country idiom for, “Momma, Jesse said something vulgar”).
Here're a couple of points.
First, it’s nuts to say anything in a broadcast studio you don’t want picked up.
Really, don’t say anything anywhere you don’t want the world to hear these days.
Which leads to the possibility Jackson actually wanted to be heard. But that’s too cynical and spy-vs.-spy to contemplate. Let’s don’t go there.
Instead think about a world where everybody gets everything out in the open naturally.
This flap won’t go anywhere. Because Obama quickly accepted a quick apology. And it wasn’t big enough to label “Jessegate.”
But the remark inside a Fox Broadcasting studio focused on the candidate’s stand that African American fathers should be fathers. That means at home and attentive to children as Obama’s dad was not.
Jackson called that “talking down to black people.”
Really interesting is his published statement of apology.
The old line Civil Rights leader said he wanted black males’ personal moral responsibility to be matched by the country’s collective responsibility for public policy.
Oh, really? H-m-m-m-m, say those folks who have moved beyond that view.
Government ought to correct itself for “the lack of good choices” that often led to their black dads’ irresponsibility, according to the Jackson statement.
Suddenly we understand Obama better for Jackson’s gaffe and follow-up.
The younger leader believes in personal responsibility. The older leader still labors under the entitlement mindset that government is to blame and needs to make up for it.
Barack Obama couldn’t pay for that kind of left-handed endorsement.
And public understanding is the better for climbing the continental divide between two views.
The unintended free flow of ideas all resulted from a single hot mic.
Open all the microphones!

The radio icon's channel comes clear

Good for Rush Limbaugh. His $400 million deal for an eight year contract extension fazes me not.
Yet I don't care for the gentleman and don’t listen to him.
That seems to me sensible instead of getting into a swivet over outlandish pay for outlandish people.
Rush comes across as the cigar-reeking, bad habit, loud-of-mouth passenger lumbering down the airplane aisle toward the empty seat next to mine.
His opinions soar with a lot of his fellow travelers. I’d have to consider a later flight if I were forced into his company.
I don’t even think it’s a liberal vs. conservative thing. My taste simply is substance over image, reason over rhetoric, meaning over controversy. Give me an open mind over an open mouth anytime.
In fact I flow from the left full circle again into conservatism and completely defend any commentator’s First Amendment right to become the unwanted flight partner.
Ah, I hear you say. How can you judge Limbaugh if you don’t listen to him?
Well, you don’t have to eat the whole egg to know it’s rotten. I’ve heard enough.
I've also read enough in Time and Newsweek and elsewhere to know their coverboy is a national phenom who isn't going away. Americans made him what he is, phenomenally.
NYT Magazine writer Zev Chavets called the guy an American icon. Yes, well, icons are one dimensional religious images.
This one's veneration comes from being "confrontational, deliberately insensitive and funny," Chavets wrote.
And his single dimension?
Well, Rush himself told The New York Times Magazine it isn't his conservatism but his business ability: "My first goal is to attract the largest possible audience so I can charge confiscatory ad rates." http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/06/magazine/06Limbaugh-t.html?ex=1373083200&en=96d69779ce7c0fb1&ei=5124&partner=permalink&exprod=permalink
Sounds like sham, a case of entertainment profit and not movement standard bearer.
Is he worth what Clear Channel is paying him? Sure, if the market will bear it. Commercial radio is like every information platform, grabbing at gold-plated straw men to cope with the digital and demographic revolt by audiences.
Media salaries at upper echelons took off into the wild blue yonder long ago.
The merger of the information industry with entertainment is like gay marriage will seem 20 years from now. What once appeared strange and perverse to some people turns ho-hum in time.
That means, of course, the Rush Limbaugh star will flame out too.
Newspapers started the star system long ago when they began running photos of their top columnists and having them speak at the Rotary and booming them in house ads.
Those promos seem primitive now. But TV news built on the concept to the point Katy Couric became CBS-TV's astronomically paid evening news anchor with $15 million a year. Now there's talk she'll be pushed out.
Katy doesn’t even mouth cigars or pop an excess of prescription drugs like ol’ Rush.
Then again, for all her personality attributes, The CBS celebrity can’t match the radio man for his familiarity with audiences.
Talent? How much does it take?
It’s that connection that matters.
Instead of getting jealous at Rush Limbaugh, we should all study how he does it.
Trouble is, then we’d have to listen to him.
Clear Channel would have to pay me the $400 million.

Revive us again! Clay Felker and a hallelujah for the magazine business!

Magazines are slick, sometimes sophisticated plays for reader attention, subscriber loyalty. And I love them.
Their circ departments must know I’m a mark. They’re always sending me their “professional rate” discount offers. So I take more than I need as a sampler.
Those markdowns suggest churn to me. Subscribers get super savings so publishers can try to stay even with their declining customer lists.
Maybe its time for another magazine revival. There is a certain sameness about all that pass in front of me.
Clay Felker built the model 40 years ago as New York. The glossy challenged even The New Yorker, the one legendary journalist Harrison Salisbury famously called “perhaps the best magazine ever.”
Everywhere you looked editors imitated New York’s graphic design by Milton Glaser, the narrative writing style by the likes of Tom Wolfe or Jimmy Breslin and the sassy service information.
When I became a newspaper features editor, our tribe was still trying to borrow as much of the tone as we could get away with.
Felker came out of The New York Herald Tribune tradition. It was said The Trib’s editors went out for sex at lunchtime, while The New York Times editors merely went for a drink.
Sexiness was and is a main ingredient to compete with other media, especially when TV does more show and tell than even movies once thought they could get away with.
New York’s groundbreaking editor invented a formula without being formulaic.
“American Journalism would not be what it is today without Clay Felker,” said the magazine’s current editor, Adam Moss. The Times quotes his statement in an appropriately generous obit. Felker died at age 82 in his Manhattan home. http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/02/business/media/02felker.html?ex=1372737600&en=20a30abd0cea6d55&ei=5124&partner=permalink&exprod=permalink
He was middle-aged and I was starting out when he taught me editors could be full of themselves. And how!
Felker and his friends Ben Bradlee, executive editor of The Washington Post, and Tom Winship, editor of The Boston Globe, spoke like a trio of mythological Graces, or maybe it was Titans, to our graduate journalism class at Columbia University.
Honestly, those egos sucked the oxygen right out of the classroom.
Humility has its place in editing. But so does chutzpah, the creative life of Clay Felker shows.
In the reinvention of modern media on all print and broadcast and digital platforms, journalism will need a revivalist of his style.